Jeju Island, Korea
October 4-8, 2004

VoiceBuilder: A Framework for Automatic Speech Application Development

Autonomous University of Tlaxcala, Mexico

In this paper we present VoiceBuilder, a framework for automating
the process of developing speech applications. For such purpose, our
framework allows speech User Interface (UI) specialists to introduce
UIs in two ways: a stand-alone GUI application, and a web-based
interface; in which speech UIs are stored in markup language
previously proposed called SUIML [1], supporting either system
initiative or mixed initiative dialogue strategies. For automatic coding,
we propose an algorithm based on a macro-processor that generates
VoiceXML code through parsing SUIML documents, this algorithm
was designed to generate various kinds of code with a minimal initial
effort. We performed experiments considering both system initiative
and mixed initiative dialogue strategies with three different speech
applications: auto-attendant, e-mail reader, and flight reservations.
This framework is very useful for building speech applications in
new domains with no programming effort and could be
incorporated into several voice toolkits.